So the FreeBSD ports tree finally moved the CouchDB port to 1.2. Upon upgrading, I discovered that the javascript indexing seemed to be dying silently on the largest of my small databases. Unfortunately this was the database that was actively used as a data store for one of my sites.

This led to two immediate actions. First I actually got around to putting the data retrieval function in a proper try/except block. This means instead of the site dying when CouchDB fails, it just tells me to kick the couch. Second I decided to rewrite the map/reduce ...